Slightly off-topic but I am dumbstruck by the size of US farms. Where I live it's common for farmers to manage 10 hectares fields and these are considered big fields.
Every year we take on workmen/students normally from outside Australia, who need to spend time actually working on a farm to finish their agricultural degrees or similar. It's always interesting to see their reactions after they finish telling us about their "big" farms back home, when they realise we can fit their entire farm + change into a single paddock here.
I know in Canada, for the longest time (At least since the 1940s), a large family farm was a 1/2 section - or 320 acres . But nowadays, a large family farm ranges all the way up to 4 sections (1280 acres). 8x improvement in 70 years.
I suspect I'm missing something subtle here - are you proposing that a single family, (with a bit of extra help during harvest), being able to farm 8 times more land, isn't a good thing? And, based on what I've seen of the tractors these days (air conditioners, enclosed cabs, hell, little beer cooler to boot!) - the work, while hard, is also somewhat less backbreaking than it would have been in the 1940s as well.
